Profile: Murray Nossel on storytelling

Profile

MURRAY NOSSEL

What’s your story?

“Not only do we communicate most effectively through our personal stories, our wellbeing and professional success depend on it,” says psychologist, performer, documentary-maker and entrepreneur Murray Nossel (Wits BA 1982, BA Hons 1983, MA 1984). This is his story.

By Heather Dugmore

Murray Nossel

“I don’t think I realised the full power of storytelling until I arrived in New York in 1990, in the middle of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” says Dr Murray Nossel from his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson River.

“I wasn’t aware of the epidemic until I got here. I was simply running away from a failed relationship in South Africa.” Seeking to escape the hurt, Murray took up the invitation of a friend in New York to visit. “My intention was always to return home, but 28 years later I’m still here.”

A clinical psychologist at the time of his move, he decided to give this a break and try his hand as a playwright and performer. “I was influenced by the work of the poet and performance artist Laurie Anderson. In the army I would listen to her on cassette under my ‘boshoed’ (army bush hat), as she shared monologues about her life. I emulated these in my own way at open mic nights in New York bars.

“People seemed to think I had an interesting voice and something unusual to say about my life in South Africa.”

In telling his story, he spoke about the woman who’d helped to raise him in the Johannesburg suburb of Dewetshof, where he grew up. “She was a domestic worker, and also a sex worker,” he recounts. “She was unable to have children, which she found shameful. Because she felt unfit to be a mother, she did what she felt she was fit to do: use her body for money and raise other people’s children.”

He also spoke about his grandparents, who came from East Prussia to South Africa in the early 1900s in search of a better life.

His paternal grandfather, Meyer Nossel, ran the butchery section of an eating-house for mineworkers at the bottom of Rosettenville Road and spoke all the South African languages. “The eatery smelled of offal and stew and his fingers were red from chopping meat all day. As a young boy, I wanted to run away from the smells and the flies and the dead cows hanging from hooks. I regret not paying greater attention to all this now, as I see it as the beginning of my politicisation. Poor, uneducated Jews like my grandfather were regarded as low lives. Everything he did was to ensure his children received a good education so that they did not have to work as he did.

“My late father, Norman, a businessman who had studied pharmacy at Wits, always stressed that people can take everything away from you but no one can ever take away what you know. Knowledge is power and they are inseparable.”

Murray’s mother, Pauline Nossel (80), originally a concert pianist, still teaches music at Wits after 60 years. “Growing up, I didn’t like having a working mother when my friends’ mothers were at home. But later I understood and deeply appreciated her need to create. My mother taught me that listening and storytelling go together.”

At the open mic sessions in New York, Murray also told his story about being gay. “This story starts in 1974 when I was at school. The teacher told the class to turn to their neighbours and tell one another a story. I was sitting next to a boy named Paul Browde, who told me a story and then asked me to share mine. I told him I didn’t have a story.

“Paul wasn’t like most of the guys who teased me for being a ‘pansy’ and ‘moffie’. Then one day one our teachers, Miss Elsbet Smit, was battling to control our class and ordered us to line up. She said ‘boys on the left and girls on the right’, at which point Paul added ‘and Murray in the middle’. I blushed from top to toe and the class laughed. It felt like a total betrayal.”

“Everyone needs to communicate well to succeed in leadership and business. And everyone has a story to tell.”

Murray says his life changed at Wits. “I transformed from the sissie boy to the cool person, with bleached blonde hair, smoking Camel cigarettes on the library lawns. “At Wits my mind was opened for me as there was a very active political movement on campus. My studies in psychology, English literature and law also gave me the tools to see the link between the personal and the political and to take action by finding a personal connection with others who shared the same ideals and aspirations.” As it happens, Paul Browde (MBBCh 1984) was studying medicine at Wits at the same time but the personal connection between the two had never been repaired since “the betrayal”. “He passed me on the library steps one day and tried to say hello, but I ignored him,” Murray recalls. The triumphant cameos in our lives are essential to our stories, and this cameo took an interesting turn. “Leap ahead to 1990 New York and my first play. Knowing I was South African, the director asked whether I knew his boyfriend, Paul Browde! On opening night, Paul came to congratulate me and also to apologise. He too had remembered the betrayal and it had plagued him all those years. “Paul and I began talking every day, revisiting our lives in South Africa and sharing what had brought us to New York. Six weeks later he revealed to me that he was HIV positive. “It was the height of the AIDS epidemic and people were dying. I told Paul, who had become a psychiatrist, how I had started recording the stories of HIV positive people on video and had discovered that telling their stories had a visible, positive effect on their wellbeing. “Sharing these stories was also helping to transform the social and political landscape. It became harder for the authorities to ignore what was going on,” says Murray, who worked in an AIDS programme from 1994 to 1996 as part of a social work PhD he completed at Columbia University.

“Through this process, I realised I needed to teach people not only to tell their stories but to listen deeply to other people’s stories. I compare listening to a bowl and telling to liquid. Just as the bowl gives the liquid its shape, so does listening shape the telling.”

Paul started telling his story about being HIV positive. Courageously for the time, he even told it to the Annual Convention of the American Psychiatric Association in 1994. “Telling his story and having people listen released a tremendous burden of suffering and gave him the will to keep going,” says Murray.

In speaking out about their status, Paul and his husband Dr David Hoos encouraged other professionals to talk about HIV, and this openness contributed to making treatment more widely available.

For the past 15 years Murray and Paul have performed a piece about their friendship, called Two Men Talking. It’s been seen at the Edinburgh Festival, on London’s West End, Off Broadway in New York and in South Africa.

They are business partners in a storytelling business, Narativ, which draws on the method developed over 25 years to train individuals, groups and organisations in the skills of listening and storytelling. They have led this training in more than 50 countries.

Today, Murray is on the teaching staff of the Programme of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The programme addresses the need of patients and caregivers to voice their experience and acknowledges the power of narrative to improve health care.

In April this year, Murray published his book Powered by Storytelling: Excavate, Craft and Present Stories to Transform Business Communication.

“Everyone needs to communicate well to succeed in leadership and business. And everyone has a story to tell,” says Murray. “Stories aren’t about who is the boss or who is right or wrong. Stories are about the ability to listen to someone without reacting emotionallly, and, in turn, to tell your story.

“Rage and violence are often a cry out for someone to listen, but it’s hard to listen to people when they are screaming at you or behaving destructively. So one of the first steps in storytelling is to shift the emphasis to listening. When we do group training, we first get everyone to agree that for a while, all they are going to do is to exchange the gift of listening and telling.

“People need to be taught to be very disciplined about this as strong emotions are easily triggered. They need to learn to contain these and share their stories in as factual a manner as possible.

“I ask people to talk about their parents, their grandparents, their childhood, their current circumstances and their personal lives, the good things and the bad, because this is where people connect. This is what improves collaboration, helps to resolve conflicts and boosts creativity and innovation.

“There is a lot of talk about transformation today, but it does not begin with policies, it begins with our personal stories and our listening ears. I hope that as Wits heads towards its centenary in 2022, the university’s story can be told through the many different personal stories of Witsies.”